Boarding school was a foreign country: the distance from Brighton seemed equal to the distance from Cape Town. As Margaret Atwood trenchantly portrays in her novel, Cat’s Eye, girls, as well as boys, can be cruel to one another in the playground.

As the main focus of this memoir is life with my father and cousin Marco at 55 Dyke Road Avenue, I intend to deal sparingly with school. This is not aiming to be yet another biography of the vicissitudes and (maybe?) triumphs of ‘my boarding school years’. But since my first experiences of boarding school were intertwined with my evolving relationship with my father, something needs to be said. And as I write, I find a reluctance to remember, of a different order from anything I’ve yet described – including my arrival in England that freezing day in January, which, to the girl being ushered into the corridor by the woman with her hair in a bun, already seemed a lifetime away.

I looked weird – my fuzzball hair did me no favours, I had a mild South African accent – in 1953, the accent of an outsider – I’d arrived in a ‘swanky’ car driven by a chauffeur, and, worst of all, my mind couldn’t operate. At the bang of the school’s front door closing, I found myself retreating into the dreamy and vague person my mother had been impatient with. I was slow to pick up the other girls’ names; slow to pick up the names of the houses we were separated into (mine was Urquhart- why not simply call us ‘yellow’ for godsake, since each house was identified by its colour: the Urquhart clan’s coat of arms was three boars’ heads on a yellow shield); slow to find my way around the buildings. Generally deemed slow, and derided as such. Oh, such a target for ridicule! ............

Read on to find out how I survived school here